Memphis Stone and Gravel Company

Memphis Stone and Gravel Company has produced construction aggregates in the Mid-South since 1910 and now operates as a subsidiary of Granite Construction. The company mines and processes sand, gravel and crushed stone across west Tennessee and north Mississippi, supplying concrete producers, asphalt plants and highway contractors. In July 2026 it opened a six-acre River Yard on the Mississippi River in Memphis, receiving limestone barged in from the Slats Lucas Quarry in Salem, Kentucky, which is owned by sister company Warren Paving. Initial inventory covers 610s, No. 8, 810, No. 57 and No. 4 stone. The yard extends Granite’s home-market approach of supplying its own projects from its own plants.

The company’s roots are in railroad contracting. C.D. and W.L. Smith built track on the Santa Fe across the Mojave Desert and on the Yellow Dog Railroad in Mississippi, worked on part of the New York City subway, then moved into mining near Birmingham, Alabama. In 1910 they leased and purchased gravel property in Camden, Tennessee and Iuka, Mississippi to feed railroad and road construction, and C.D. Smith bought Memphis’s Exchange Building to house the new corporate office. The first wash plant opened at Iuka in 1926, and washed gravel became the company’s main product from there on. During the Second World War it served as prime contractor for Dyersburg Army Air Base and the Murfreesboro artillery ranges and supplied base material for the Milan arsenal.

The current plant network was assembled over four decades. The Love plant in Mississippi was bought from Mid-South Gravel in 1979 and still runs. North Plant and the Batesville wash plant opened in 1983, the Fly Plant at Grenada in 1998, the Perry Plant at Senatobia in 2006, and the DeSoto plant south of Southaven in 2016. Senatobia was permitted in 2005 and, according to the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality’s Office of Geology, sits on the largest permitted gravel resource in the state.

Mined-out ground gets a second life. The Airways Plant property in DeSoto County was reclaimed and is now occupied by a CarQuest Auto Parts store and Campbell Clinic. The Atkins Pit near Collierville closed in 1978 and the reclaimed land became the Bray’s Station residential subdivision.

Quality control is handled in-house across eight laboratories, one at each site, staffed with Level 3 certified asphalt technicians. The main lab holds an asphalt pavement analyzer, or rut tester, used to measure deformation, cracking and gradation, and those labs also serve as the primary testing facility for sister company Lehman-Roberts. The product list extends well past highway stone into pea gravel for pool decks and playgrounds, drainage rock, landscape rock and Gravel E for dewatering. Sales carry a $50 minimum and deliveries a 10-ton minimum, with the main office open 7 a.m. to 4 p.m. weekdays.